by Eden Butler
“No. I don’t mean…”
I hadn’t realized just how much anger I was holding inside, but now that I let some of it loose, the rest couldn’t be held back. “Not that you made me feel like I was insane for…” one of the movers took out a cigarette and lit it, his attention on us and not his co-workers who awkwardly moved a large chest of drawers toward the van. “You made me think I was insane for…thinking what I think. For believing what I believe in. You called me insane, you called me a witch, you pretty much told me I was fucked any way you look at it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, holding up his hands. For a second I thought he might reach out, try to touch me and I prepared myself for it, ready to push him back. “I don’t think you’re insane. I don’t. I just think there is a lot of…” Nash looked around the sidewalk, nodding me away from the car to get us out of earshot of the nosey mover. “There’s a lot of things that can’t be explained.”
“They can,” I said, a little louder, my temper returning with the frown he gave me and the stubborn way he looked away. “You just happen to call the explanations crap.” A few small, indiscernible words came out of his mouth, but Nash didn’t repeat them loud enough for me to hear.
“Can we go upstairs?” He nodded toward the building, even took a step toward it before I shook my head. “Why not?”
“I don’t live here anymore.” It was true. I’d sent Mom’s university friend, Mr. Lewis my key that morning. The Super would find another tenant and I’d be gone soon, gone for good.
“Willow. Please. I don’t like this…” he waved between us, finally scrubbing his face when I folded my arms over my chest. “Where are you going? How long…”
“That’s not important. It’s not…don’t worry about it.”
This time when Nash looked at me, his large hands moved to the back of his neck, rubbing hard, as though he needed to release the tension that had grown there. “It’s damn well important to me, Will.”
I wanted to smile at him then. I wanted Nash to open his arms and tell me he loved me. I wanted him to admit he believed me…that he simply believed in things he couldn’t see, things that didn’t make sense to the logical mind at all. But he had let me just walk away. He didn't try to fight, he didn't try to think outside the box he’d put himself in. He’d turned his back when coincidences couldn’t be explained. Worse yet, he’d accused me of trying to trick him, even though he had felt the very same things I had. Those dreams were memories—we shared them. Even if we didn’t understand how, they meant something, and rather than being amazed, he’d run from them. From the truth. He’d run from me.
I tried one last time.
“Why, Nash? Why is it important to you?”
Say it, I thought. Please. Tell me you love me. Say, ‘Because of everything’ and mean it.
“I’d…damn…” Nash shrugged, looking uncomfortable, looking a lot like a kid standing in front of a grown up being asked to explain why he'd misbehaved. But Nash wasn’t a kid. No matter if he'd acted like one often enough. He took to rubbing his neck again before he dropped his hand, smiling, but with no conviction. “I’d hate to see you go. The place would be too quiet without the noise you make and then there’s the cupcakes…”
He stopped joking when I lowered my shoulders, gripping my keys in my hand as I stepped back into the street, meaning to yank the door of my car open to show just how angry I was. I heard the first syllables of my name come from his mouth, then screams to my left, the screech of tires and the blast of a horn. The stench of street tar was all around me, thick and metallic, heavy and cloying. The smell, it was awful and still it enveloped me, poured up into my sinuses and wound its way inside my head, and for a second, I let the smell take me…
Sookie gripped the chain tight and I wanted to stop her. I wanted to kill my father, kill them all, all the damn fools that had started this. They screamed about the rain, the flood that came out in the river. They cursed Sookie, they cursed her mama like it had been their fault for running from the threat when it came. Fools, fucking fools, all of them.
She looked down at me from so high above, and I read my name on her lips. I wanted to catch her. I wanted to go with her into the smoke. I wanted…
She dropped fast. I ran. Sylv did. We tried to catch her. But she was too far away.
We tried to stop the world from spinning.
It went on and on and part of me died with her.
I loved her. My first love. That love had lived, it always would. Inside my veins. Inside my blood. For one brilliant moment in time, that loved lived.
She went pale before the baby came. Like she knew. My darlin’ Riley had known it could happen. Her body was a thin thing, not like her heart. Not like her spirit. Sometimes a body isn’t built for a spirit that is bigger than the world itself. Sometimes it fails and sometimes that failing destroys the world. It wrecked mine.
She was weak, they told me. There had been too much blood loss.
The baby had come and he was a soldier, a strong champion that grew and lived with the same fire his mama had.
But Riley was pale when I saw her. She hadn’t the strength to lift her head from the pillow. Couldn’t even hold the baby when they brought him in.
“You do it. Please.”
I took my boy, stronger than his mama, stronger, if I’m honest, than I was just then and I held him because my darlin’ asked me to. I held him close and let him lay beside her wondering if she knew him. Praying she did. Believing she would.
“Riley?”
She’d been too pale. Too damn pale and those eyes slid closed. Dear lord, how I loved her. How I loved her so. That love had lived, it always would. Inside my veins. Inside my blood. For one brilliant moment in time, that loved lived.
I loved her. It came to me alongside with Sookie’s fear and Isaac bottomless sorrow. It came to me when Willow fell, when her keys hit the street and got crushed beneath the metal wheel of the tar truck. It came to me as I shot forward, as I grabbed her and held her away from the noise and chaos behind us.
With everything inside my veins, inside my blood, I loved her.
Nash
“I’m sorry. Oh sweet God, Will. I’m so sorry.”
It didn’t matter. The crowd, the worried onlookers who huddled around us, the construction crew all sweaty from work and fear, the movers, unused to such drama in their normally mundane lives. All I saw was the color coming back to her face. All I felt was the death grip of her fingers on my collar. “Willow, I’m so sorry.” I could say it a million times and it wouldn’t be enough. None of it. “Please, forgive me.”
“Nash…” her voice was weak, but loud enough that it made me look down, a wild rush of relief running through me as I touched her face, her shoulders, as I kissed her over and over until the small sound of my name came again. “Please…just let me breathe.”
“Are you hurt? You fell.” I held her back, fingers everywhere, running over her arms, holding her hands, moving them out of the way to get a clearer look at her. Her sweater was torn and she’d lost a tennis shoe in the tumble to the tar-slick ground, but she wasn’t hurt. Thank the powers that be, she wasn’t hurt.
“I’m fine.” She pushed on my shoulder and I helped her up. “Can we…let’s go inside, okay?”
“But you need a hospital or…there could be internal injuries or, hell…”
“Will you stop?” She waved off the construction foreman when he got closer. “Really, he’s overreacting. I’m fine. Just tripped on my own damn feet and nearly bought it under that truck.”
“Ma’am…” the guy protested, coming closer.
“Seriously, the track was a good five feet from where I fell. It’s fine, honestly. No worries at all.”
Willow moved to her car, grabbing the door, before I stopped her. “Where are you going?” I couldn’t believe she was still thinking of leaving, now. She opened her mouth and I thought there was something biting she was going to say, something that would have me dol
ing out more apologies, so I didn’t give her a chance.
“I’m sorry. I’ll say it a thousand times, I swear. I’m sorry I was an asshole to you. I’m sorry I let you walk away.” I stood so close to her now Will had to rest against the car door to look at me. For once, she was uncharacteristically quiet. “You asked me why it mattered, you leaving? It matters, Willow. It matters because I love you. It matters because I don’t want to go to bed at night wondering where you are, wondering if you’re safe or sad or tired or happy or a billion other things.” I took her face, lowering my voice so only she could hear me. “It matters because God or fate or the universe or whoever clearly wants us together. Because Sookie and Dempsey didn’t get a happy ending, and Isaac and Riley’s got theirs taken from them. I don’t know who they are, Will. I don’t know if it’s you or me or people who share our blood. I don’t care about any of that, about the why, about the how. I only know that I want you, that you twist me up, that I’m sprung, so stupid sprung over you. It matters, you leaving. It matters because I don’t want you leave without me.”
I didn’t wait for her to answer. I didn’t need to hear she loved me. I knew it. It was in every look she’d ever given me. It was in the sweet swirl of her mouth on mine. It was in each touch, each laugh. The words didn’t matter to me at all.
“Nash,” she said when I leaned down to kiss her.
“Yeah?”
“I need to get something out of my car. Then, let’s go upstairs. I…” she looked around, grinning at two movers when they passed us by. “There’s something I need to show you.”
Nash
The building was quiet. No lights lit up the hallways and no answer came when we knocked on the door. “We should check the roof.”
Will nodded, holding my hand when I offered it to her as we headed toward the stairs. “You said his cell was disconnected?”
“Yeah.” I held open the door, letting her in front of me as we climbed the stairs. “Been at least a week since I’ve heard from him. But then sometimes he goes AWOL. He always shows up again.” She moved through the door, holding it open for me when I came behind her and we walked toward the cages where Roan kept his pigeons.
“Think he’ll show up again?”
But I didn’t answer Willow. There was a little too much worry crowding my head, coupled with all the other confusing things that had happened that day. The cages were empty.
“There were pigeons. Hundreds of them.” I waved at the empty cages, two sets of six rows, all vacant, even the water from the dispensers and the feed in the bowls were gone. In fact, the only thing that remained of the birds were some random feathers and a single spattering of droppings. Everything else had been cleaned away.
She moved around the cages, closing the open doors, her head shaking as she looked first at me, then around the roof. “I don’t understand why…”
“What is that?” I asked, pointing at a red envelope stuck between two of the cages. Will was closer and grabbed it, but once she looked at it, she smiled. “I’m guessing this is for you.”
Will handed it over and I copied her smile, spotting Roan’s messy scrawl “My man…”
When I opened the envelope there were numerous sheets of neatly folded paper and a silver key which fell from between them. Read this inside was jotted on the outside of the pages. “What does he…”
“Here,” Willow said, picking up the key to hand it over. “There’s more to discover, it seems.”
The old bastard had slipped his apartment key in the envelope, something that struck me as monumental since I’d never gotten even the smallest glimpse inside his place before now. But the key had a number, 1313, and I knew exactly which door it would open, though none had numbers.
“Come on.”
We headed to the last door on the third floor, a place Roan had told me he had taken over when he moved into the building because he liked to watch the sunrise from that spot. It gave him a clear view of the park.
A slip of the key and we were inside, exploring the nearly empty apartment. There was no furniture anywhere in the large, loft space, which I guess hadn’t always been a loft. Heavy wood beams stretched from one end of the room to the other and in the center, near to where a small kitchenette sat in a corner, two more beams ran vertical on either side. It looked like Roan had used a small air mattress to sleep on, but it was deflated and a thick blanket sat in the center, folded neatly with a pillow on top of it.
“Didn’t leave much, did he?” Will asked stepping away from me to nose through the row of upturned boxes and the books that lay scattered across the brick floor. She squatted down, picking up one by the corner, a smile tugging on her mouth when she read the cover.
“What is it?” I asked, coming toward her.
“The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins.” My mom has this one. In fact,” she said, standing up to hand over the book. “I’m pretty sure Roan…or Mr. Lewis…whoever he was gave it to her.”
“Sneaky asshole.”
There was a make-shift wall dividing the main living area and when I walked to the far side of it, I came face to face with an expanse cluttered with photographs, printed images, sketches and graphs. Multi-colored strings of yarn linked one image to another, mapping out relationships, drawing one generation to another. I decided whatever I thought I knew about my old mentor was going to get thrown right out the window—along with so much that I once thought I believed.
“Son of a bitch,” Willow said, voicing my thoughts as she came to stand next to me. Almost all of the pictures were old, some going back a hundred years, maybe even earlier than that. “Nash, the letter.”
Until she mentioned it, I’d almost forgotten. “You read it,” I said, stepping closer to the wall. There was a clear division, with a length of black string separating one section of pictures from the other. At the top of the right side was the messy scrawl of “Simoneaux.” To the left, came “Lanoix.” Those names were familiar and, by looking at the pictures, I started to get an idea why.
Some were in color—those I only glanced at. Some, like the one Willow had shown me earlier that night, were of Roan, or the man who I thought was Roan. Near the top, taped to a brick was a picture that Will’s great-granddaddy had also had in his little box of keepsakes. There were four people in this one—Sylv and Sookie standing next to Dempsey, all smiling, all glancing to their right, looking at a tall man with dark skin who wore a jaunty fedora. The picture in the old man’s box had listed four names: three we knew, and one we didn't. Sookie, Sylv and Dempsey were familiar, but not the man who went by “Uncle Aron.” Yet even though the name wasn’t familiar, the face certainly was. He hadn’t been Aron when Willow met him as Mr. Lewis, her mother’s university colleague who’d given her the key to his rent-controlled apartment. He hadn't been Aron, but Roan, when I got to know him as one of my college professors, then my mentor; he was the one who, four years ago, clued me in about an apartment building in Brooklyn that I might want to check out. Now his face was in a decades old photograph, while the letter he had written only a day ago was in my hands.
“Read it, please,” I said to Will, my gaze never leaving the images. Hundreds of faces reminded me of my kin; many looked like Will and what I guessed her own people had looked like.
Willow unfolded the papers and began to read. “Nash, you’re reading this letter because things have aligned. Finally, I hope. For the duration of your life, at least, I pray.”
As I listened to her voice, I studied picture of Sookie and Dempsey. Something about the boy’s face in this one seemed vaguely familiar.
Behind me, Will continued. “There are things that should not be explained. Things, I wish I could tell you, but fear you’d never believe, about me, about the life I have led. You told me of the dreams you had and the memories you shared with your Willow. First, let me say that you have not lost your young mind. You aren’t being set up for some prank and Willow isn’t a witch, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself
she is.” She lowered the page, telling me with the quick arch of her eyebrow that she wasn’t amused. “You told him I was a witch?”
“Willow, you yanked me into your apartment inside of a minute of laying eyes on me, and then you announced you wanted to cleanse my aura.” I turned, facing her, hoping my smile would disarm her look of skepticism. “Wasn’t long after that I started having the dreams. What else was I supposed to think?”
She smacked my arm with the paper, but smiled while she did it, holding back a laugh. “A witch? Really? Do you see me wearing a pointy hat?” I opened my mouth, gearing up for another apology, but Willow looked down at the letter again and started to read. “And you aren’t experiencing these memories because you’ve lived them before. Reincarnation is a dream made up by folk who can’t believe there is only one go around in life. They cling to it, to the hope that they will get a second chance. This isn’t yours. Well, not completely.”
I turned back to the board, focusing on the same boy, tilting my head to stare at his smile and the shape of his chin.
“There is a connection you feel with Willow because it has existed for a very long time and most probably will continue to exist for many generations into the future. It will not end with your life or with hers. It will go on, you see, as long as the world does.”
Will came to stand next to me as I continued to examine the picture on the wall. When she caught sight of what I was looking at, she lowered the page she had been reading, and lifted up a hand her mouth, which was suddenly hanging open. “What?” I asked, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, as though she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. “I didn’t realize it with the other pictures.” She pointed at the board, right at the picture I’d been staring at. “Dempsey. He’s so young in this picture. I’ve never seen him so damn young.”
“What do you mean?”
She looked at me, pressing her lips together like she wasn’t sure how to make the word unfurrow from her throat. “Dempsey is my great-grandfather, Nash.”